Case study
Building a scalable international marketing platform from a traditional corporate website
ChinaNHD partnered with Human Made to replace a slow, ageing corporate site with a fast, multilingual WordPress platform its own team can run and expand.
Industry
Manufacturing
Services
Bespoke Development, Consultancy & Strategy
Humans
About ChinaNHD
Founded in 1992, Jiangsu New Hongda Group (ChinaNHD) is an established Chinese engineering and equipment manufacturer. It supplies filtration and separation equipment, including filter presses, agitators and pressure vessels, to the global mining and chemical industries.
For ChinaNHD, the website does more than a typical corporate site. It has to show technical capability to buyers who need to trust it, and link products to real project references. It also supports SEO and content marketing across several regions, and generates enquiries. The old site fell short on nearly all of it.
A site holding the business back
The old site was created using a page-builder, ran on older PHP, and took around six seconds to load. It was slow enough to lose ChinaNHD leads it was paying to generate through search. Underneath that sat a set of compounding problems:
- Unreliable hosting. The hosting was prone to timeouts and database errors under load.
- Page-builder bloat. Heavy page-builder patterns made reliable updates difficult.
- Developer dependency. Content changes still needed developer support, which slowed publishing and campaigns.
- Failing forms. Enquiry forms failed intermittently, at exactly the point customers were trying to get in touch.
- Weak multilingual structure. Search engines couldn’t treat the site as one authoritative international site, and there was no proper Chinese-first layout.
ChinaNHD wanted to present its engineering expertise more clearly, build a stronger foundation for search, and improve enquiry paths. It also needed a platform that would keep supporting marketing work long after launch.
Ultimately, they chose Human Made because they wanted a partner who could see the bigger picture and understand how the site needed to work as a long-term platform.
This project was never simply about giving the website a more modern appearance. We wanted to build a digital platform that could support NHD’s long-term international growth.
The ChinaNHD team
Choosing the foundation first
The most important decision came at first contact, before any formal scope existed. ChinaNHD could reasonably have expected another page-builder rebuild. Human Made made the alternative case, because the builder was the source of the site’s performance and maintenance problems. Building natively in the WordPress block editor would remove that dependency for good. It would also let ChinaNHD benefit from new WordPress capability as the platform develops. ChinaNHD agreed, and that decision shaped everything that followed.
The multilingual structure followed the same logic. It uses subdirectories rather than subdomains, with hreflang linking equivalent pages, so search engines read the whole estate as one site. ChinaNHD owns its translation pipeline rather than routing it through a third party, which keeps process and cost under its control as languages are added.
A system, not a page-by-page build
Instead of designing all thirteen templates individually, Human Made designed the key ones and turned them into a reusable UI kit, blocks and patterns. These reusable components allowed ChinaNHD’s team to build the rest themselves.
Six sprints ran over roughly fifteen weeks. Language coverage grew from two, English and Chinese, to five, adding Arabic, Spanish and French as ChinaNHD’s priorities shifted. The design also moved from dark to light partway through, and bespoke Chinese layouts and sustainability pages were added. Throughout, the approach stayed consultative: requirements changed as ChinaNHD saw the site in use, and the team prioritised the work that would bring the most business value. The final stretch was tightly compressed, but the site went live on schedule with zero critical bugs.
A platform designed to scale
What sits behind the site:
- A WordPress multisite serving five language editions from one structure
- Custom content types for Products, Projects, Certificates and History
- A documented UI kit built from core blocks and patterns, with no page builder
- Gravity Forms lead capture, CRM integration, verified analytics and an AI chatbot
- Redirects preserving existing URLs, with no indexing errors after launch
- Kinsta and Cloudflare hosting, with a defined strategy for access from inside China
- An MCP server, built outside the original scope, that lets ChinaNHD’s team use an AI assistant to map relationships between content, feeding the site’s structured data
Several of these point the same direction: a platform built to work with AI as much as with search engines. Translation runs through ChinaNHD’s own account rather than a shared third-party service, and the site’s consistent structure means AI assistants can read product information directly, not just crawl it.
The outcomes
Largest Contentful Paint (the metric Google weights most heavily) fell from around six seconds to 784 milliseconds on the homepage with its full-width hero video while the heaviest product page, with its 360-degree product views and animations, now loads in under 2.5 seconds. Lighthouse scored 99 for performance, 100 for accessibility and 92 for SEO, with all Core Web Vitals lab scores green.
Five language editions launched against an original scope of two. Arabic was the hardest, bringing right-to-left content into a left-to-right design system. The Spanish edition went live in time for ChinaNHD’s conference in South America.
The site was also completed to WCAG 2.1 AA and tested across browsers, including Chinese browsers. Search Console was set up at launch to track indexing and rankings.
Most importantly for ChinaNHD, its marketing team was building pages, managing product and project content, and replacing assets well before launch. That work used to depend on developer support.
The site was built with performance first in mind. We did it in the right way. The stakeholders, design, and development execution aligned to have the site performant, SEO-friendly, and yet creative.
Ivan Kristianto, Lead Engineer, Human Made
With our previous website, many changes felt dependent on technical support. The new block-based editing experience gives us significantly more control.
The ChinaNHD team
Visit ChinaNHD’s new website.
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